The Last Bounty at Mercy Creek II

A Western WLW Mini Novella The Ballad of Rachel Boone At noon, Mercy Creek began to make noise. The church bell rang though no service had been called. A wagon with one bad wheel rattled along the east road. Two boys fired at bottles near the dry creek until their father cursed loud enough for three farms to hear. Clara, bless her wicked heart, somehow convinced a cattleman to move twenty restless steers past the ridge, and their lowing rolled across the land like weather. Daggett came out onto the Whitcomb porch with his rifle in hand. Rachel watched from the barn loft. Mary stood behind him, one eye swollen now, her hands clasped tightly in front of her apron. Daggett shouted something at her. Mary nodded. Daggett looked toward the road. Then toward the creek. Then toward the barn. Rachel lay flat above the rafters and did not breathe. He stared for a long time. Too long. Then the black gelding kicked its stall door open. The horse burst into the yard, bridle half-hanging, eyes wild from the pepper Rachel had rubbed into the leather. Daggett swore and ran toward it. Mary did not move. Rachel dropped silently from the loft into the hay below, crossed to the rear of the barn, and set the first fire. Not a true fire. Smoke. Damp hay, green wood, a touch of lamp oil, enough to make a thick gray coil rise behind the barn without catching fast. Then she ran low along the fence, circled toward the well, and waited. Daggett saw the smoke. “Mary!” he roared. “Get water!” Mary flinched and grabbed the bucket. Rachel’s heart hammered. Daggett kept the rifle in one hand, pistol in the other, and his eyes on Mary as she moved. He was not stupid. Rachel hated him more for that. Mary reached the well. Rachel was hidden behind the stone wall, close enough to hear her breathing. “Don’t look at me,” Rachel whispered. Mary nearly dropped the bucket. Daggett shouted, “Hurry!” Mary’s eyes filled, but she kept them on the rope. Rachel slid the derringer from her boot and tucked it beneath the loose stones at the base of the well. Not for Mary to fight with. Rachel knew better now. Mary could barely stand beneath the weight of being watched. The derringer was there for one reason only: if Rachel failed, Mary would not be left with nothing. “Cellar,” Rachel whispered. “When he comes for me, run cellar. Bar the door.” Mary’s lips barely moved. “He’ll kill you.” Rachel watched Daggett approaching, smoke thickening behind him. “He can try.” Then Rachel slipped away, leaving Mary at the well, leaving Daggett angry, leaving the farm full of movement. She had learned long ago that men like Silas Daggett loved control more than life. So she gave him too many things to control. The horse loose. The smoke rising. The town noise. Mary at the well. A stranger’s tracks in the dust. His stolen safety collapsing inch by inch. By the time Rachel stepped into the open near the barn with her hat low and both hands visible, Daggett was sweating. “Looking for me?” she called. Daggett turned. Mary froze beside the well. Rachel saw Daggett’s pistol swing toward Mary first. Of course. Rachel shouted, “Thomas Hartley.” Daggett stopped. The name struck him somewhere old. Rachel walked forward slowly. “Remember him?” Daggett’s eyes narrowed. Rachel took off her hat. The wind moved through her brown-gold hair. “Small farm outside Abilene. Green door. Cottonwood by the wash. You killed him for thirty dollars, a horse, and a silver watch.” Daggett stared. Then recognition came, slow and ugly. “Well,” he said. “Look at you.” Mary looked from him to Rachel, horror widening her face. Rachel kept walking. “Look at me good.” Daggett grinned. “You were prettier crying.” Rachel smiled. “And you were younger running.” Daggett raised the pistol. Not at Rachel. At Mary. Rachel stopped. Daggett laughed softly. “There she is. The widow. I wondered if you were still under all that leather.” Rachel’s hand hovered near her gun. Daggett pressed the pistol toward Mary. “Draw and she dies.” Rachel lifted both hands. Mary made a small, broken sound. Daggett stepped backward until he could grab Mary by the arm and drag her in front of him. “Thought you were clever,” he said. “Thought I wouldn’t know a trap when I smelled one?” Rachel said nothing. Daggett’s arm locked around Mary’s throat. Mary clawed once at his sleeve, then stopped when the pistol touched her ribs. Rachel’s world narrowed to the barrel, Mary’s face, Daggett’s grin. “You came all this way,” Daggett said, “and now you’re going to toss that gun belt in the dirt.” Rachel did. Slowly. The belt landed at her feet. Daggett laughed. “Kick it away.” Rachel kicked it. “Knife too.” Rachel pulled the knife from her boot and dropped it. “The other one.” She smiled faintly. Daggett’s grin twitched. Rachel removed the second knife from her sleeve and dropped it. Mary stared at her with devastated eyes. Daggett said, “Now you’re learning.” Rachel shrugged. “I’ve always been a slow student.” “What else?” Rachel lifted her coat open. “No more iron.” Daggett looked her over, greedy with triumph. And that was when the church bell rang again in the distance. Once. Twice. Three times. Daggett glanced toward the sound. Only for half a breath. Rachel threw her hat. Not at Daggett. At Mary. The hat struck Mary’s face and made her recoil sideways by instinct, just enough that Daggett’s pistol shifted off her ribs. Rachel lunged. Daggett fired. The bullet tore through Rachel’s coat instead of her chest. Rachel hit Mary and drove her down into the dust, covering her with her own body as the second shot cracked over them. “Run!” Rachel shouted. Mary could not. Her legs failed. Rachel rolled off her, grabbed a fistful of dirt, and flung it into Daggett’s eyes as he came forward cursing. Then she ran the wrong direction. Away from Mary. Toward the barn. Daggett, half-blind and furious, followed exactly as Rachel had known he would. The barn swallowed Rachel in shadow. Daggett came after her with rage in his eyes and dust on his face, firing once into the dark. The bullet punched through a beam. Rachel moved behind the stalls, low and fast. “You think I don’t know barns?” Daggett shouted. “I been killing farmers longer than you been playing gunman.” Rachel said nothing. She wanted his voice loud. Wanted his boots hard. Wanted his pride leading him by the nose. Outside, Mary dragged herself toward the cellar steps, sobbing with effort. Rachel heard every inch of it and forced herself not to look. Daggett fired again. Splinters stung Rachel’s cheek. She reached the ladder to the loft, climbed halfway, then kicked it loose. It fell with a crash. Daggett laughed. “Trapped yourself.” Rachel, hanging from the loft edge by both hands, swung one leg up and rolled onto the boards above. Daggett fired through the planks. A bullet ripped past Rachel’s thigh. She bit down on the pain and crawled toward the loose beam she had prepared before dawn. Below, Daggett shoved through the stalls, searching for another way up. “Thomas begged,” he called. Rachel froze. Daggett laughed in the dark. “Oh, you didn’t know? He begged. Not at first. First he tried to stand tall. Men do that when their wives watch. Then I shot him low and he begged plenty.” Rachel’s vision blurred red. Her hand closed around the rope. Daggett continued, voice thick with pleasure. “Begged me not to hurt you. Begged me to take the horse, the money, whatever I wanted. Good man, maybe. Stupid.” Rachel whispered, “You’re lying.” “Am I?” Daggett stepped beneath the loft. Rachel could see his hat now. His shoulders. The rifle slung across his back. The pistol in his hand. “I might have left you alive because you were pretty,” Daggett said. “Or maybe because grief makes better punishment than bullets.” Rachel pulled the rope. The rusted bear trap she had rigged above the stall beam swung down hard, not open, not to catch flesh, but heavy as a hammer. It struck Daggett’s pistol arm. The gun flew from his hand. He screamed. Rachel dropped from the loft onto him. They hit the dirt together. Daggett was bigger. Stronger. Meaner in the way men are mean when they believe size is destiny. He struck Rachel across the face, once, twice, hard enough to fill her mouth with blood. Rachel drove her knee into his bad leg. He howled. She reached for the pistol. He grabbed her hair and slammed her head against the stall door. Light exploded behind her eyes. Outside, Mary reached the cellar. Daggett saw her through the open barn doors. “No!” he roared. He threw Rachel off and staggered toward the yard. Rachel crawled, fingers searching the dirt. No gun. No knife. Nothing. Then her hand found the half-empty laudanum bottle in her coat pocket. Daggett reached the barn doors. Rachel rose behind him and smashed the bottle against the back of his head. Glass broke. He stumbled. She looped both arms around his throat from behind and dragged him backward with every ounce of hatred, grief, muscle, and seven years of not dying. Daggett slammed her into a post. Once. Twice. Rachel held on. He reached back, clawing at her face. She held on. Mary reached the cellar and fell inside. Daggett made one last desperate surge toward the door. Rachel hooked her boot behind his bad knee and threw them both down. This time, when he hit the dirt, Rachel was already reaching for the pistol that had fallen near the stall. Daggett rolled. Rachel fired. The shot filled the barn. Daggett stopped. Dust drifted through the shaft of sunlight between them. For a moment, Rachel heard nothing at all. Then she heard Mary crying from the cellar. Rachel sat in the dirt, pistol in hand, blood running from her mouth, and looked at Silas Daggett. The man who had killed Thomas. The man who had killed Daniel. The man who had taken seven years from her and eight days from Mary and mercy from every room he entered. Dead. Rachel waited for triumph. It did not come. Only silence. Only exhaustion. Only the terrible discovery that revenge, even when deserved, did not resurrect anything. She lowered the gun. “Thomas,” she whispered, and her voice broke. “I found him.” Mary would not come out of the cellar until Rachel called to her three times. Even then, she emerged slowly, as though the daylight itself might strike her. Rachel stood in the yard with one hand pressed to her ribs, her face bruised, coat torn, hair loose beneath the sun. Daggett’s body lay covered in the barn. Daniel’s body lay covered beside it. Mary looked at Rachel. Rachel looked at Mary. Neither woman spoke. Then Mary crossed the yard in a sudden, broken rush and hit Rachel so hard with her embrace that Rachel nearly fell. Rachel stiffened. Mary clung tighter. “You came back,” Mary sobbed into her shoulder. “You came back. You came back.” Rachel’s arms hovered uselessly for a moment, as if she had forgotten what they were for. Then she held Mary. Not well. Not gracefully. But she held her. “He’s dead,” Rachel said. Mary sobbed harder. Rachel stared over her shoulder toward the bright empty land. “He’s dead,” she repeated, perhaps for Mary, perhaps for herself. When Marshal Pike arrived near sundown with two deputies and Sheriff Crowe trailing behind like a guilty dog, Rachel had already dug one grave for Daniel Whitcomb beneath the elm near the house. Mary insisted on standing there. She trembled through the whole thing. Rachel stood beside her. When Crowe tried to speak kindly, Mary turned away. When Pike examined Daggett, the scar, the old warrants, the stolen watch chain still in his pocket, and the letters tucked in his saddlebag, he signed the bounty claim without argument. “Five thousand,” Pike said, looking at Rachel’s split lip and swollen cheek. “You earned it.” Rachel glanced at Mary, who stood on the porch with Clara’s shawl around her shoulders, because Clara had ridden out with the marshal as soon as she heard the shots had stopped. “No,” Rachel said quietly. “I survived it.” Pike looked as if he might answer, then thought better of it. Clara came to Rachel after the burial, while Mary sat inside at the kitchen table staring at a cup she had not touched. “You look awful,” Clara said. Rachel leaned against the porch post. “You say the sweetest things.” “I could say sweeter, but I suspect they’d bounce off.” Rachel watched Mary through the window. Clara followed her gaze. “She has nobody,” Rachel said. “She has herself.” Rachel nodded. “I know.” “And maybe,” Clara added, “someone who was planning to be done riding anyway.” Rachel did not answer. Clara touched her arm. “Rachel Boone, don’t you dare mistake staying for pity. Women know the difference. Mary will too.” Rachel looked at her. Clara smiled sadly, kindly, beautifully. “You found your ghost. Now decide whether you want a life.” Inside, Mary lifted her eyes toward the window. Rachel met them. Something passed between them. Not love yet. Not fully. But the first fragile thread from one wounded place to another. Rachel stepped into the house. The first week after Daggett’s death passed like weather after a tornado, full of wreckage that looked different in every light. Mary did not sleep. Rachel did not leave. At first, those facts had nothing to do with each other. Rachel stayed because Mary’s fence was broken, because the cow needed tending, because Daniel needed a proper marker, because the marshal required statements, because Sheriff Crowe was suddenly full of apologies Rachel did not trust, because men from town began to appear with offers to “help” Mary sell the place for insulting sums, and because Rachel discovered that having five thousand dollars in bounty money made a person rich enough to be useful and not nearly rich enough to be free of fools. Mary moved through the house like someone asking permission from furniture. She apologized when she dropped a spoon. She apologized when a door slammed in the wind. She apologized when Rachel found her sitting on the kitchen floor before dawn, unable to remember why she had gone there. Every time, Rachel said the same thing. “You don’t owe me sorry.” Mary never seemed to believe her. On the fourth morning, Rachel found her trying to scrub blood from a floorboard that had already been scrubbed raw. Mary’s hands were red. The brush shook in her grip. Rachel crouched beside her. “Mary.” “It won’t come out.” “It’s gone.” “No, it isn’t.” Rachel looked at the clean board. Then at Mary’s face. Slowly, she took the brush from her. Mary let it go like it weighed fifty pounds. Rachel sat on the floor beside her, back against the cabinet, knees drawn up, saying nothing. Mary stared at the board. Then she whispered, “He made me cook breakfast the morning after.” Rachel closed her eyes. “He sat at Daniel’s chair,” Mary said. “Ate Daniel’s eggs. Asked why the coffee was weak. Daniel was in the barn.” Rachel’s hand tightened around the brush. Mary’s voice became small. “I thought if I did everything right, he might leave.” Rachel opened her eyes. “That’s how men like him build cages. They make survival feel like obedience.” Mary looked at her then. “You know that?” Rachel gave a hard little smile. “I know cages.” Mary studied her bruised face, the cut at her mouth, the scar near her collarbone where the shirt opened. “Your husband,” Mary said softly. “Thomas.” Rachel looked toward the window. “Yes.” “Did you love him?” The question should have hurt. It did. But not as Rachel expected. “Yes,” she said. “He was good. Gentler than me, even before I got like this. He thought beans tasted better if you sang at them.” Mary blinked. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed. It was a tiny broken thing, but it was laughter. Rachel looked at her. Mary covered her mouth, horrified by herself. “I’m sorry.” Rachel shook her head. “No. He would have liked that.” Mary’s eyes filled. “Daniel used to name chickens.” Rachel raised an eyebrow. “Did they answer?” “No. But he insisted they had preferences.” Rachel leaned her head back against the cabinet. “Men are strange.” Mary laughed again, and this time Rachel smiled. Only a little. Only for a second. But Mary saw it. And the house, which had held nothing but fear for so many days, changed by one breath. By the second week, Rachel had paid Daniel’s debts. Mary found out from Mr. Bell at the mercantile, who had the decency to look ashamed after telling her. She stormed back to the farm with flour in the wagon, cheeks flushed, eyes bright with the nearest thing to anger Rachel had yet seen in her. Rachel was mending the west fence when Mary marched across the field. “You paid Bell.” Rachel drove a nail into the rail. “Yes.” “And Haskins.” “Yes.” “And the feed bill.” Rachel hit the nail again. “Yes.” Mary stopped three feet away. “That was not yours to pay.” Rachel looked at her. “You were going to lose the farm.” “That was not yours to decide either.” Rachel straightened slowly. A month earlier, any man who used that tone with her might have found himself chewing dust. But Mary was not a man. Mary was furious, frightened, proud, and alive. Rachel found she liked all four. “You’re right,” Rachel said. Mary blinked, robbed of momentum. Rachel took off her gloves. “I should have asked.” “Yes,” Mary said, though less fiercely. “I’m asking now.” “That’s not how asking works after the thing is done.” “No,” Rachel admitted. “I expect not.” Mary folded her arms. Rachel looked past her toward the house, the barn, the fields, the life Daniel Whitcomb had tried to build and Silas Daggett had almost destroyed. “I had bounty money,” Rachel said. “More money than I know what to do with.” “You could leave.” “I could.” “You could buy land anywhere.” “I could.” “You could start over.” Rachel looked at her then. The wind moved Mary’s hair loose from its pins. Rachel’s voice lowered. “I thought that was what I wanted.” Mary’s anger softened into something more dangerous. “And now?” Rachel swallowed. “Now I wake up and listen for whether you’re crying.” Mary’s lips parted. Rachel looked away at once, angry with herself for saying too much. “I don’t mean that how it sounds.” “How does it sound?” “Like pity.” Mary stepped closer. “It did not sound like pity.” Rachel’s hands curled at her sides. “I don’t know how to stay, Mary.” Mary’s eyes shone. “I don’t know how to be stayed with.” That silence was different from all the others. Not empty. Full. Rachel picked up the hammer because she needed something in her hands. Mary took it from her and set it on the fence post. “Ask me,” Mary said. Rachel frowned. “What?” “Ask me if you may help me keep the farm.” Rachel stared at her. It felt foolish. It felt terrifying. It felt harder than facing Daggett. At last Rachel said, “Mary Whitcomb, may I help you keep your farm?” Mary lifted her chin. “Yes, Rachel Boone. You may.” Rachel let out a breath she had been holding for seven years. Mary smiled. Then, because healing is rarely elegant, she pointed at the fence. “And you may start by fixing that rail properly, because you’re splitting the wood.” Rachel looked at the rail. Then at Mary. Then she laughed. A real laugh this time, rough and surprised, and Mary smiled as if she had found something valuable in the dirt. Rachel moved into the spare room after that. Not because Mary asked exactly. Not because Rachel offered exactly. It happened because the work stretched, because the roof needed patching, because the mare foaled early, because Mary still woke screaming some nights, because Rachel still woke with her revolver in her hand, because coffee tasted better when Mary made it, because Rachel’s saddle began gathering dust in the corner of the barn and neither woman mentioned it. Clara visited twice. The first time, she brought fabric, gossip, and a pie so ugly Mary laughed before she could stop herself. The second time, she watched Rachel carry water from the well while Mary hung laundry, and afterward Clara kissed Rachel’s cheek goodbye with a smile that held both affection and farewell. “You look less dead,” Clara whispered. Rachel glanced toward Mary. “I feel less certain how to be.” “That’s better than dead.” Rachel nodded. Clara squeezed her hand. “Be good to her.” “I don’t know if I’m good.” “Then be honest. It lasts longer.” That evening, rain came. Not a storm. Just a slow, steady rain that softened the dust and made the roof tick like a clock. Mary cooked beans with salt pork and cornbread in an iron skillet, and Rachel sat at the kitchen table cleaning her revolver because old habits died slower than men. Mary watched the gun. Rachel noticed. “I can put it away.” “No,” Mary said. “I don’t mind the gun.” Rachel paused. Mary stirred the pot. “I mind that you look at it like it’s the only thing that knows you.” Rachel said nothing. Mary set the spoon down. “I’m sorry. That was too much.” “No,” Rachel said. “It was true.” Rain tapped the window. Mary came to the table and sat across from her. “Did you mean it?” she asked. “What?” “That you were done. After him.” Rachel looked at the revolver in pieces before her. “Yes.” “What does done look like?” Rachel gave a faint, helpless shrug. “I used to think it looked like a cabin somewhere no one knew my name.” “And now?” Rachel’s eyes lifted. Mary was lit by lamplight, her bruises fading, her hair unpinned, her sleeves rolled, flour on one wrist. Alive. Here. Waiting. Rachel’s voice roughened. “Now it looks like rain on this roof.” Mary’s breath caught. Rachel looked down quickly. “I shouldn’t have said that.” Mary reached across the table. Her fingers touched Rachel’s scarred knuckles. Rachel went still. Mary did not grip. Did not demand. Only touched. “You say that often,” Mary whispered. “What?” “That you shouldn’t have said something true.” Rachel stared at Mary’s hand on hers. “I scare people.” “You scare men who deserve it.” “Not only men.” Mary’s thumb moved lightly over Rachel’s knuckles. “You don’t scare me.” Rachel almost laughed, but it broke halfway into something else. “I should.” Mary stood slowly. Rachel looked up. Mary came around the table and stopped beside her chair. For a moment, neither woman moved. Then Mary bent and kissed Rachel’s forehead. A simple kiss. Gentle. Devastating. Rachel closed her eyes as if struck. Mary whispered, “There. I survived.” Rachel looked up at her. Something opened then, not suddenly but inevitably, like a door swollen shut by rain finally giving way. Rachel rose. Mary did not step back. Rachel lifted one hand to Mary’s cheek, careful of where the bruise had been. Mary leaned into it. “Tell me no,” Rachel whispered. Mary’s eyes filled. “No to leaving,” she said. “No to pretending. No to being grateful when I am more than grateful.” Rachel’s mouth trembled. “And yes?” Mary smiled through tears. “Yes to this.” Their first kiss was soft because both of them were afraid of breaking something. Their second was not. Outside, rain washed Mercy Creek clean by inches. Inside, Rachel Boone, who had crossed half the West hunting a dead man’s murderer, kissed Mary Whitcomb like she had found the living world by accident and did not intend to lose it. Mary came to Rachel’s room later, barefoot, with her hair loose over her shoulders and a quilt wrapped around her like courage. Rachel was sitting on the edge of the narrow bed, elbows on knees, staring at nothing. When Mary appeared in the doorway, Rachel stood too quickly. “I can sleep in the barn.” Mary almost smiled. “You will not.” “The kitchen, then.” “No.” “Mary—” “I am thirty years old,” Mary said, voice trembling but firm. “I have been widowed, terrorized, pitied, advised, and nearly sold out of my own home by men who thought fear made me simple. Do not you start deciding what I mean for my own good.” Rachel shut her mouth. Mary stepped into the room. “I know what gratitude is,” she said. “This is not only that.” Rachel’s voice was hoarse. “You’ve been hurt.” “Yes.” “I don’t want to be another thing that happens to you before you’ve had time to breathe.” Mary came closer. “You are not happening to me, Rachel. I am walking toward you.” That undid her. Not the kiss. Not the desire. That. The choosing. Rachel sat slowly, as if her knees had forgotten their duties. Mary sat beside her. For a while they only held hands. Then Mary rested her head on Rachel’s shoulder. Then Rachel turned her face into Mary’s hair and wept, silently at first, then with a grief so old and buried it seemed to come from the floorboards, from the fields, from the grave beneath the cottonwood in another county. Mary held her. No one had done that when Thomas died. No one had dared. And when the tears passed, when the lamp burned low, when Mary lifted Rachel’s face and kissed the salt from her cheeks, the night became theirs quietly, tenderly, without hurry, without conquest, without anything taken. Two women who had been used by violence chose gentleness instead. And in the morning, Rachel woke with Mary’s hand resting over her heart. For the first time in seven years, her revolver was not under her pillow. By autumn, the Whitcomb farm had changed its name, though no sign announced it. People in Mercy Creek began calling it Boone Place because Rachel handled the horses, paid the bills, and discouraged trespassers with a look. Mary called it home. Rachel called it Mary’s. Mary corrected her every time. “Ours,” she would say. Rachel would pretend not to hear. Then one evening, while they sat on the porch watching the sun turn the fields bronze, Mary took Rachel’s old wanted posters from the trunk beside the door. Rachel stiffened. Mary did not apologize. She unfolded the one with Daggett’s face last. The paper had begun to soften at the creases. Mary looked at it for a long time. Then she handed it to Rachel. Rachel stared down at the face that had ruled her life. “I thought killing him would finish something,” she said. “Did it?” Rachel looked toward the pasture where two horses grazed nose to nose. “Yes,” she said slowly. “But not the thing I thought.” Mary leaned against her shoulder. “What did it finish?” Rachel folded the poster once. “The part where I belonged to him.” Mary took her hand. “And now?” Rachel looked at Mary. At the woman who had come back to herself inch by inch. At the house no longer silent. At the porch repaired, the garden replanted, the barn cleaned, the dead buried, the living fed. At the life she had not known how to imagine. Rachel set the wanted poster in the lantern flame. It caught slowly, blackening at the edges before Daggett’s ink face curled into ash. Mary watched. Rachel watched Mary. Then Rachel said, “Now I belong where I choose.” Mary smiled. “And where is that?” Rachel kissed her hand. “Here.” Mary leaned up and kissed her mouth. The sun slipped lower. Somewhere down the road, Mercy Creek rang with evening bells, wagon wheels, distant laughter, and the ordinary sounds of a world still full of trouble. But on the porch of the farm east of town, Rachel Boone rested her hand over Mary’s, watched the last bounty burn away, and did not reach for a gun when the dark came. The Ballad of Rachel Boone A Story by Germaine Corbeau - Click here for links to all Germaine Corbeau Stories! Quick 👏 Guide: 0 = I got lost! - 1-4 = Nice font... nice images. - 5-9=Read a bit. Nice try!, 10-14=Okay... Pretty good!, 15-19=I actually enjoyed this! - 20=Absolutely legendary!